There are two main areas in which Congress can enact meaningful reform. The first is to rein in regulatory guidance documents, which we refer to as “regulatory dark matter,” whereby agencies regulate through Federal Register notices, guidance documents, and other means outside standard rulemaking procedure. The second is to enact a series of reforms to increase agency transparency and accountability of all regulation and guidance. These include annual regulatory report cards for rulemaking agencies and regulatory cost estimates from the Office of Management and Budget for more than just a small subset of rules.
In 2019, President Trump signed two executive orders aimed at stopping the practice of agencies using guidance documents to effectively implement policy without going through the legally required notice and comment process.
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Regulatory Reform in the 118th Congress: Separation of Powers Restoration Act
The separation of powers is a key aspect of American government. To decentralize power and ensure checks and balances, the Founders divided the federal government…
City Journal
Roll It Back
Medicaid, the federal-state entitlement for the poor, now provides health insurance to more than one in four Americans. Enrollments surged after the Affordable Care Act…
Blog
This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
An Executive Order from the Biden administration made some of the biggest system-level regulatory changes in years. It raises the threshold for “economically significant”…
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Op-Eds
Will Democrats Kill Their Golden Goose?
To the naked eye, a hike in the federal minimum wage looks like a done deal. Speaker-designate Nancy Pelosi will include it in the…
News Release
U.S. District Court to Hear Landmark Sarbanes-Oxley Case
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Newsletter
The Competitive Enterprise Institute Daily Update
Issues in the News 1. TECHNOLOGY Big technology companies lobby Washington for data privacy legislation. CEI Experts Available…
Op-Eds
Time for a virtual games Declaration of Independence
Some say online virtual reality operations like “Second Life” have attained the stage of evolution that blogging and the Net itself occupied several…
Newsletter
The Competitive Enterprise Institute Daily Update
Issues in the News 1. INTERNATIONAL The European Union approves a new law, known as “REACH,” regulating the manufacture…
News Release
SEC Drops the Ball on Sarbanes-Oxley
Contact: Richard Morrison, 202.331.2273 Washington, D.C., December 13, 2006—The Competitive Enterprise Institute today criticized the Securities and Exchange Commission for failing to provide meaningful…
Staff & Scholars
Clyde Wayne Crews
Fred L. Smith Fellow in Regulatory Studies
- Business and Government
- Consumer Freedom
- Deregulation
Ryan Young
Senior Economist
- Antitrust
- Business and Government
- Regulatory Reform
Fred L. Smith, Jr.
Founder; Chairman Emeritus
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- Aviation
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Sam Kazman
Counsel Emeritus
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Marlo Lewis, Jr.
Senior Fellow
- Climate
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- Energy and Environment